Filmed by Peter Greenaway

Cinema and painting. Hedonism and symmetry.

If Godard said that “the cinema is truth twenty-four times per second”, Peter Greenaway seems to point towards eternity. His films do not seek to build a story along the footage of the film, but rather they create images, generate an aesthetic that seeps into the viewer once the credit titles start to roll. It is not surprising that, until he discovered the films of Ingmar Bergman and began to devote himself to the seventh art, his true fascination was painting, a profession he adored. In his more than half a century of profession as a director, Greenaway has experimented with all formats, denouncing those who considered films as a mere illustration of the text and the main visual composition at levels of formal refinement not successfully achieved until then.

A staunch advocate that painters such as Velázquez, Vermeer and Rembrandt were those who invented the language of cinema, Greenaway seeks inspiration among them by reinterpreting and adapting strategies with light, image textures or depth of field to a film with clear signs of authorship. His admiration for these, at the end of the 2000s, was at its highest point when he made a documentary, a biopic and a film series on the figure of Rembrandt and the painting The night watch. A work that Greenaway, accusing us of visual ignorance in being blinded by the text, analyses in detail revealing the conspiracy and the mystery hidden in the work of Rembrandt. This emblematic image, one of the most well-known paintings and viewed from the history of art, becomes the scene of a police investigation portrayed by the Dutch painter in strokes of oil paint and that Greenaway reveals to the viewer.

Intrigue surrounds all the films of the British director whom, although he defines himself outwardly as a supporter of the image versus the text, one can not deny his talent in his writing. His films plot stories that revolve around familiar themes: lust, murder, conspiracy. However, these occur in a strange universe where a minimal event can trigger a whole series of tragic circumstances: even a simple white swan.

Peter Greenaway is a director who does not hide his fetishes, but rather shows them eagerly almost like an exhibitionist. The camera in his films remains steady, capturing reality as if the director was painting the canvas while everything is happening, or, on the contrary, it moves with precision, in horizontal glances that seem to come onto the scene as if it were a theatre production. The director also likes symmetry, an obsessive fetishism that crosses all his work very clearly. Greenaway, who has now become a kind of an architect that reinterprets spaces already constructed, has space for perfect symmetry framed between columns, large marble staircases or statues.

However, if one feature stands out in the British director's films, it is his taste for hedonism. His films are full of characters led by sexuality worthy of the Greek satyrs, as well as plenty of sexual harassment and adultery, which sometimes refer directly to Greek mythology. But not all of Greenaway's pleasures are sexual. Food and alcohol are also temptations that main characters in films such as The cook, the thief, his wife & her lover’ or The belly of an architect must resist. This hedonism, sometimes aggressively violent and pornographic, leads to an ending in which Greenaway, now turned into a witness and judge, as Rembrandt concealed in The night watch, judges and determines the ending for the characters he himself created and the vices he gave them.

Filmed by Peter Greenaway 1

Intervals

Intervals

Peter Greeaway

1969

06:25

United Kingdom

DOC, EXP

B/W

This short experiment shows the same, rhythmically cut footage of back-street (and essentially water-less) Venice three times, each time with a different soundtrack, emphasizing the way a soundtrack affects what we actually see and perceive.

H is for house

H is for house

Peter Greenaway

1973

08:46

United Kingdom

DOC, EXP

COL

The film begins in a dreary black and white setting in a foreign country, probably Italy, and with a monotonous ticking noise. Images of people scurrying around and posters on walls. Then suddenly we are thrust into a most tranquil location. The pleasant rural English countryside. Apple trees and the birds singing. The director narrates to us a short tale about a naturalist and the title is shown, accompanied by a spurt of music by Vivaldi. The narrator is Colin Cantlie, the familiar voice heard on the other Greenaway films: Water Wrackets, Vertical Features Remake, Dear Phone, A Walk Through H and The Falls. A little girl plays in the garden, while her mother tends to her and other chores. H is for many things. Other letters of the alphabet are narrated. The film concludes with another witty story.

Water Wrackets

Water Wrackets

Peter Greenaway

1975

11:17

United Kingdom

DOC, EXP

COL

Hypnotic photography of swirling rivers and misty ponds and droning music (not Michael Nyman for a change) form the backdrop to a documentary-style narration about the history of a fictional tribe in the distant past (or is it the far future?).

A walk through H: The reincarnation of an ornithologist

A walk through H: The reincarnation of an ornithologist

Peter Greenaway

1978

40:31

United Kingdom

DOC, EXP

COL

An anonymous narrator outlines a bizarre journey taken through "H", aided by a series of extraordinary maps, and his previous dealings with the mysterious Tulse Luper and the keeper of the bird house at the Amsterdam Zoo.